Such A Joy To Be Outside

A couple days of 90 degrees and everything goes gangbusters.

Some WS'd petunias have buds on them...finally! Marigolds are growing at an unbelievable rate, after sitting at a standstill for what seems ages. The Toad Flax is blooming. (thanks Don!) It is sooo cute! The WS's crackerjack marigolds I planted in the containers by the pond are blooming. :-) The butterfly weed seeds Sissy sent are ever so slowly growing. (I don't know what I'm doing wrong with them!) And I got one Datura from the seed she sent, which surprised me - I figured I'd get none at all. It's a good foot and a half tall and bushier than anybody's business!

My husband is a genius. Of course, since we hit 90 and there's no water to do a water change in the pond - the koi spawned. ~sigh~ WHY, for pete sake, why? Not that I wouldn't be happy to see a few babies, but not when they make such a friggin mess and the ammonia skyrockets. Ugh! Anyway, D figured out how to finagle a sort of 'fry coral/playpen thingy before the big piggers could slurp all the eggs up. He slapped together some pvc pipe he had left over from the pipes bursting last winter, and I cut and sewed an old curtain into a rectangle that we slid over the frame, added some extra pieces of pipe insulation foam and voila!...a floating egg/baby fry containment system. I've got the frog spitter aimed into a corner of it for oxygen and a little water movement. Heh, the big boys aren't to happy their banquet moved to an unreachable spot. Tough! Hopefully there won't be too many hatchlings. The consensus seems to be that they do much better in the pond than they do when they're brought in to an aquarium, so we'll see. I'm really glad we figured out this setup, because no way did I want to deal with setting up an aquarium and doing water changes every day. This way, with the clean spitter water going in at one end and the ammonia exiting (pretty much everywhere), it's a constant water change.

The pepper plants are more than happy with this mini heat wave. They're turning into bushes! There are tiny toms on all the tomato plants. Only one of the zucchini seeds Kim sent germinated, but we all know what you can get from just one, so I'm happy! I guess I just had to be a bit more patient with the broccoli - the heads have gotten huge! The cabbages are coming along great, and the brussel sprout plants are hip high! Man, are they gonna be something when they start producing! The watermelon germed better than I expected, though they had a setback with the chilly weather earlier last week. And the Once In A Blue Moon pumpkin seeds Kim sent are going nuts! I can't wait to see how they do! And the cukes are really happy campers as well.

The parsley that didn't really do much last year (I'd purposely planted them for the butterflies) but has grown into a monster shrub this year and is covered with butterfly caterpillars. They've eaten most of the top 2/3, and I'm hoping they'll be enough to hold out for them. All the butterfly bushes are doing fab! The last couple days of major heat and humidity have given them a grand boost.

The inpatiens that I wintered over are really looking nice and bushy, and finally putting on a nice bloom. I grabbed a few Siberian Iris that someone had put beside the road for free, and I know where I want them to go, but I can't get them in the ground just yet - a golden finch decided to build her nest in the wild raspberry bush ouside the bathroom window and I don't want to disturb her or the babies. They're so cute! They're the only baby birds I've ever seen that don't make any noise when you come near the nest - just gawk with their mouths wide open. How funny they are. :-)

The bee balm is budding and almost ready to bloom, the nasteriums are huge and loaded with color. I think my favs are the striped yellow and orange. Ok, maybe the deep maroon. Well, I really like those pale yellow...oh, I love 'em all!

And the Moonflower vines are doing very, very well. I can't wait to see blooms!

It took me a week, yes, a week to weed between the sones in the pathway, even with DD's help. (I was absolutely shocked she wanted to!) I'd really like to fill them with something, but I don't think I've ever seen seeds for Baby Tears or Corinthian Mint. I certainly couldn't afford to buy them. That's quite a bit to cover. Besides, I've heard Baby Tears have a nasty habit of being invasive and I will soooo never plant anything that is invasive ever, ever again! Uh-uh!

Things are looking better, bushier and lovely. I spend every single spare second I can find out there and it's good to be ouside these days...even with the daily watering. But, that way I get to really see what's going on up close, enjoy the growth and the beauty, and talk sweetly to everything telling it how wonderful it looks. Shhh! My neighbors probably already think I'm nuts...

I Didn't Ask For That!

I just wanted some rain (which we got enough of to barely wet the surface of the soil), I certainly didn't ask for a tornado! Bah!

Thank goodness it never touched down. My fool husband stood out there watching. Of course, stupid me stood outside and watched the one heading for town last year (June 30) while he was busy running to the cellar with the kids from the one that actually hit us from behind. Still haven't gotten the damage from that one fully fixed, much less do we need another :(

This weather is just crazy this year. I don't think I've ever seen such extremes. Wicked snowstorms and thunder boomers, sure, but tornadoes around here used to be a phenomenon. I think I have pics from the one that hit us back in 84, since it was so rare we were all out snapping damage pics. Not so much anymore. Seems we see funnel clouds 2 or 3 times a year now.

My WS'd flowers are humming along at a very, very slow pace. I'm starting to wonder if they'll even get big enough to bloom before fall. I have had to resist the urge to water them mid-day.

We have a very tiny pepper coming! Yay! I can't wait to start cramming those in the freezer. I better not count my chickens just yet. ~crossing fingers~

Oh! And the redheaded woodpecker has build a nest in the snag on our front lawn! YES!!!

The Veg Garden Is IN

Whew! Yay!

I can't say it's done because, well, it's never done. There are always those mundane tasks of watering, weeding and bug picking.

I was a bit sad that no one took the tomato and brussel sprouts that I put out for free, but a friend of D's had never tried growing them before, so figured he'd give it a try. He hadn't purchased his toms yet either, so he got a two-fer. :) There are some down sides to living in the middle of nowhere. The selling extra veg for WSing soil might be out after all.

All my WS sprouts are in, except for the few I'm still going to give more 'wait and see' time.

I ended up giving my SIL some buddleia and toms. She just found out she has cancer, so I'm not sure how much time she'll have to mess with them - or even if she'll feel up to it. God, I hope everything works out well. I don't know what I'd do without her. She's one of those people that's just really good - inside and out.

We got really small heads on the broccoli this year. Of course, the seedling were probably pretty stressed out with the house going from a nice comfy 65 down to freezing and then back up again. The humans weren't too fond of the temps bottoming out either.

My eldest son works at a construction supply place that gets 'less than perfect' merchandise and sells it really cheap. He brought me some leaf stepping stones that are broken, but I might be able to salvage a few for a walkway. Anyone have ideas on what I can do with broken and chipped stepping stones? Some are pretty bad. They feel kind of soft, like they're made from plaster of paris. I know they aren't, but that's how they feel. Strange.

We haven't made any progress on the foundation winter barrier/flowerbeds. We need to find some way to get the logs here. Ya know, I refuse to have a truck because of the gas guzzling, but it sure would be nice to have one! Especially since we found a beautiful glass door someone was throwing away after a remodel. Hey, we TRIED to force it into the little Neon! lol. D kept telling me it wasn't going to fit and I kept telling him we could make it fit. Ok, ok, so I was way wrong. Points to D for visual dimensional math. Pfft! At least I got another blind to make labels, so yay!

My WSed petunias took off like crazy. Once they had heat and water, look out! No blooms yet, but they're working on it.

I wish we'd get some rain. We're so deep in drought that it'll take all summer or more to get the water table back to anywhere near normal. Hope everyone is having a wonderful gardening season!

Excellent Idea

I hope they get the funds to keep doing this yearly. These people really get it...

Garden in a Bucket

Kudos to the person that starts all those seeds :)

Well, Make Up Your Mind

6/7/07 = record low of 37

6/8/07 = record high of 93

It was the second driest May ever.
~Sigh~

At least the storms that rolled through last night were no where near as intense as to the west.

It is so not a decent gardening year. Every day a different plant is either happier than a plant in ... well, you-know-what ... or moping.

My Aunt called to commiserate. We ended up having a pretty interesting discussion on the 'playing' of gardening.

Playing. We've decided that is exactly what the majority of people do, but then again, it's suppose to be a fun thing, right?

Neither her, nor I, get to play, however. For us it's pretty much work, not so much of a hobby. If there's a year like this with crappy weather and we get a low harvest, well, we get to put less in the freezers. Period. There is no 'just running to the nursery to replace' whatever plant the wind, temps or hail took out.

We've come to the conclusion there is a pretty hard line between the playing of gardening and the necessities of it. Maybe dabblers would be a better word.

Hmmm...besides her and I, I don't really know many people that garden specifically to preserve for winter. I think the biggest difference is that if we don't harvest, we don't eat vs. they don't harvest, they just buy. As far as the flowers, we absolutely adore them all, but if we get wiped out it isn't something we depend on.

With all that said, we still get an unbelievable amount of joy from gardening, even when things go wrong. Here's to hoping both her and I both end up with a grand veg harvest.